Dynamic Component Substitutability Analysis

Sagar Chaki, Edmund Clarke, Natasha Sharygina, Nishant Sinha, Proceedings of Formal Methods (FM), LNCS 3582, page 512-528, July 18-22, 2005

Abstract: This paper presents an automated and compositional procedure to solve the substitutability problem in the context of evolving software systems. Our solution contributes two techniques for checking correctness of software upgrades: 1) a technique based on simultaneous use of over and under approximations obtained via existential and universal abstractions; 2) a dynamic assume-guarantee reasoning algorithm - previously generated component assumptions are reused and altered on-the-fly to prove or disprove the global safety properties on the updated system. When upgrades are found to be non-substitutable our solution generates constructive feedback to developers showing how to improve the components. The substitutability approach has been implemented and validated in the ComFoRT model checking tool set and we report encouraging results on an industrial benchmark.

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